The Life of Bette Davis
In Dark Victory, Critic Ed Sikov Examines Davis through her Films
Sikov brings a fresh perspective on the turbulent life of this unforgettable two-time Academy-Award winning actor.
Movie star Bette Davis has been caricatured for several decades as a drama queen - a person who makes emotional mountains out of molehills. In this fair-minded and fascinating biography, Ed Sikov reveals, through a detailed analysis of her personal and professional life that this characterization is very close to the truth. "Nervousness, hysteria and paranoia are defining features of Davis's acting style," he notes. These qualities are also the ones that shaped her personality - for better and for worse.
An Icon for Gay Culture
There have been other biographies of Davis, but this is the first one by a gay man, who examines films such as Dark Victory and Now, Voyager to show their lively effect on gay culture. In the 1940s, the Production Code forbade expressions of overt homosexuality, and when gay characters were introduced, such as Franklin Pangborn in Now, Voyager, they were handled with so much subtlety that it was a kind of wink at a gay audience. (Straight viewers often did not catch the wink.)
According to Sikov, "Eve Sedgwick may have founded queer theory on the concept of the epistemology of the closet, but gay men know the ontology of theater equally well--the being of acting, the essential reality that only stylization can fully reveal."
Bette Davis became an icon for several generations of gay men, and helped them learn, he says, "through wit and style and camp" to transcend the less-than-perfect and often humiliating world they found themselves in.
Inadvertent Humor
Several of Davis's friends claim that she had no sense of humor. Her wit, they said, was inadvertent, and she didn't know that what she said was funny. Sometimes her humor was at someone else's expense and made people angry.
When she was filming Whales of August, the cast and crew were having dinner when Davis started castigating Joan Crawford. One of the guests got mad and told Davis that Crawford had been his friend and that he didn't want to hear anything negative about her. Davis, without missing a beat, responded, "Just because a person's dead doesn't mean they changed."
Davis bickered with her directors over the smallest points in scenes, and got a reputation for being difficult to work with. Still, she was so beloved by audiences that she was in great demand, and is one of the few actors in history who worked until the very end of her life, making well over a hundred films. Sikov believes the key to her success was that she "dares us to hate her, and we often do. Which is why we love her."
Warner Brothers treated Davis badly for many years, and they paid her far less than other stars. She sued the company and lost, but the court case gave her much valuable publicity. She was able to create a new persona for herself on her own terms, Sikov says--"a strong-willed independent thinker as confrontational as any man."
That Sikov has written unsentimentally about Bette Davis, without exploiting the sensational aspects of her life (four marriages, numerous affairs and a far from idyllic family life), is a marvelous feat.
Henry Holt and Company 2007, ISBN 978-0-8050-7548-9
